Roads and aqueducts
Eighty thousand kilometres of paved road and city water supplies not matched again until the 1800s.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 611 years
- Known to
- ± 50 years
- Era
- Classical, Holocene
Rome builds a road network of some 80,000 kilometres, engineered in layers with drainage and milestones, primarily to move armies and secondly everything else. Eleven aqueducts supply the city of Rome with water at a rate per head comparable to a modern city, running on gradients of a few centimetres per kilometre. Both are as much political statements as infrastructure: they make the empire administrable and visibly permanent.